A Unified Theory of Names Essays -- Philosophy Philosophical Papers

A Unified Theory of callABSTRACT Theoreticians of call are currently split into two camps Fregean and Millian. Fregean theorists preserve that names pay back referent-determining senses that account for such facts as the change of cognitive content with the substitution of co-referential names and the meaningfulness of names without bearers. Their enduring problem has been to state these senses. Millian theorists disclaim that names have senses and take courage from Kripkes arguments that names are primed(p) designators. If names had senses, it seems that their referents should vary among possible worlds. However, the Millians have the enduring problem of explaining the obvious cognitive content of names. I argue that Mills original theory, when purged of confusion, provides word-reflexive senses for names. Frege failed to notice senses of this peculiar(prenominal) sort. Moreover, it is these senses that account for names rigid designation. When the views of Mill and Frege a re understood as complementary, the problems that have faced the split up theorists of names vanish. The division of terms into connotative and nonconnotative is, consort to Mill, one of the distinctions that go deepest into the nature of language. (1) The importance of this distinction was reaffirmed by capital of Minnesota Kripke in Naming and Necessity. Kripke followed Mill in holding that proper names must be understood as nonconnotative. To insist on this smorgasbord was, on Kripkes view, to reject the powerfully supported view of names that originated with Frege. (2) Since the issue of Kripkes lectures theories of names have come to be thought of as divided into two opposing types-Fregean and Millian.This opposition of theories has impeded the development of a satisfacto... ...(2) capital of Minnesota A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Boston Harvard University Press, 1980), 26-27.(3) Gottlob Frege, On brain and Meaning, in Translations from the Philosophical belles-lettre s of Gottlob Frege, 3d ed., ed. Peter Geach and Max Black (Totowa, NJ Rowman & Littlefield, 1980), 57.(4) Mill, 34.(5) Ibid., 35.(6) Ibid., 36.(7) Ibid., 37.(8) Ibid., 38.(9) Frege, On Sense and Meaning, 56.(10) Ibid., 57-58.(11) Ibid., 58n.(12) Ibid., 58.(13) Frege, On Concept and Object, 46n.(14) Kripke, 68-70.(15) Note that the bearer of Socrates is a rigid description, a connotative term, synonymous with the nonconnotative term Socrates.(16) Pauline Jacobson, The Syntax/Semantics Interface in Categorial Grammar, in The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory, ed. Shalom Lappin (Oxford Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 90.